


What's in a Name?

by Defira



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-21
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-14 01:44:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2173308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Names have power, and sometimes we find our name on the path towards something greater. </p><p>Five Inquisitor origin stories, and the names they found for themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The social perils of an unmarried horned daughter

If Aruha had ever had another name- a proper name, a qun name- she had never known it. When she’d been found, naked but for a filthy nappy in the lower decks of a crowded slaver ship and unshackled, she’d been sitting in a puddle of briny water and slapping the surface, alternating between delighted raspberry noises and repeating something that sounded like roo over and over again, stopping only to giggle wildly and kick her tiny feet. 

There was no record of her in the cargo manifest, and the crew had nothing to say about her when interrogated by the captain of the Orlesian naval vessel that had captured them. She couldn’t have been more than two, and even that was at a stretch.

But then again, none of the men in Her Imperial Majesty’s navy had a great deal of experience with qunari toddlers, of all things. 

She was brown and horned, like her brethren from the northern isles, her hair as pale as ice, but all resemblance to the goat men was superficial only. She was bold and excitable, chirping at the sailors and the officers in her peculiar language- none of them were familiar enough with the tongue of the qunari to know whether she was speaking their language, or whether she was babbling her own eccentric sounds as small children are wont to do. 

The crew named her Aruha, _a-roooo-ha_ , an attempt to mimic the sound she loved more than any others. That delighted her, and she was utterly fearless as she clung to their legs and poked at their face, blowing raspberries and giggling hysterically at the sound. 

The captain, a messere Gilles, took a particular shine to the tot- he and his wife had tried for years in vain to conceive a child, and the Maker had not seen fit to bless their house. His wife was perhaps too old now to safely carry a babe to term, and they had sadly and quietly come to terms with the fact that theirs was not a dream that was meant to be.

And now a small brown girl with horns, fearless and apparently without a family, had fallen into his waiting hands.

He knew when the Maker was trying to speak to him, and this message was clear. 

Aruha, mysterious waif, became Aruha Adarious, daughter of Captain Gilles and Marienne Adarious of Val Chevin. Not quite noble, of course, for nobility was more closely guarded than the jewels of Val Royeaux, but still comfortably wealthy and basking in the benefits that came with being such a high ranked naval officer. 

Aruha was an affectionate and mischievous child, who seemed to take no offense at people’s natural suspicion of her and who seemed to be capable of charming even the most cold-hearted of matrons at social gatherings- though she did see to outgrow her garments almost as soon as the seamstress was done with them. 

She was a good two feet taller than her mother by the time she stopped growing, a goofy and delightful young woman who was just as much at home in the finest salons of Val Chevin as she was on the docks. 

And her parents adored her, smitten to the point of bursting with pride for their adopted daughter. She could charm a room as easily as she could scale the rigging in her father’s warships, and there seemed no end to her potential- except for the small problem that Aruha saw no need to utilise such potential, and was more than happy to lounge about to the late hours of the afternoon, sleeping until noon, and dancing ‘til dawn. 

It became necessary to quietly hint at the need for ambition, or at the very least direction. And when quiet hints did not seem to make their point, her father bought her a commission within Her Imperial Majesty’s Army.

Her mother packed her lunch on the day she finally left for war, a reluctant scout.

She would return a Saviour.


	2. Never trust a surface dwarf, they’ll cut your purse and then your face

Peggy had always been a quiet child- although of course she’d not gone by Peggy as a babe. She’d had a proper name once, a name carved in stone in the Shaperate under the names of her ancestors, a name that conveyed a wealth of history and pride and power. Not really fitting for a wee babe who didn’t speak her first words until she was almost two, and was startled to tears by the most insignificant of noises. 

But fitting for a dwarf of Orzammar of noble blood. 

There had been older- and louder- siblings, but their faces were gone now; their names would have been chiselled from the stone on the same night of the purge, their very existence erased. She still wondered if her name was there, alone on a tablet scarred by the sharp edges of correction tools. Had they counted the bodies, the night King Bhelen had moved against Harrowmont’s old supporters? Did they know the smallest and the quietest had slipped through the net on the night a new king had cemented his rule with the blood of the old world?

She did not remember a great deal about that night, or any of the nights that came before it. She could not recall her father’s voice, or the smell of her mother’s perfume. She remembered great stone hallways and red lanterns, and golden building blocks in her toy box, but she did not know the name of her forefathers, the name of her ancestor.

Could you still pray to an ancestor, if you did not know their name? If you did not know your own?

The night that she became Peggy, her mother had been agitated- that much she knew with certainty. There had been arguments, the sour and bitter taste of fear in the air, and her father carried an axe at his waist. It clanked as he walked

_-scrape, thunk, scrape, thunk-_

he must have worn armour too. She hated the sound, hated it then and hated it now, and the sound of metal scraping still made her cringe and want to bury her head. 

Her nursemaid had worn hands, fingers calloused from a lifetime of drudgery, and Peggy hated that about her. She was too rough sometimes, wearied by her quiet and awkward charge, and sometimes she pulled the buttons a little too hard when helping her dress in the morning, or was a little too quick to throw up her hands in frustration and declare her unmanageable. 

But her hands had shook that night- Finella, nursie’s name had been Finella- as she’d begged her to hurry with her shoes and hurry with her cloak. She had touched her often, a hand to her cheek and her eyes red with tears unshed, and that was unusual enough to cling with her, the memory still painful years later. 

The servants had tunnels, private entrances to the noble houses so that they wouldn’t clutter the streets and taint the view. She remembered stone hallways, and red lanterns, and she remembered crying because she was tired and wanted to nap. 

Finella had hushed her angrily and scurried through the tunnels, clasping her fiercely to her breast, even though she was no longer a wee thing. 

Great gongs had rung in the distance, and she had not the maturity to know yet what that meant. 

She had sobbed and begged to go home, and nursie had begged her to remain quiet and cried as well. 

She did not remember the paths they took, or the great halls of Orzammar, which she would never see again. She did not remember the carvings of the Ancestors or the guards who had hurried them forward towards the Gates. She did not remember the gold that had changed hands, or the panicked whispers that had passed between nursie and the guards.

But _oh_ , she remembered the stars.

The Gate had creaked under the immensity of its own weight, gears winding and clicking as they swung slowly open, and in that moment Peggy had stopped crying.

Cold wind slunk in through the gap in the doors, sharper than any of the cold Orzammar had to offer, sharp and wet and scented with a thousand things she had no name for. There was no moon that night, and the sky was like inky velvet, the most exquisite darkness she had ever seen. Her whimpers had died away as she stared, little face red and sticky and mouth agape.

The depth of the darkness was astounding, but it paled in significance to the stars- oh, stars! No story book in her nursery could ever have done them justice. The colours, bright and sharp and soft and twinkling, a hundred million diamonds scattered across the roof of the world.

She hiccuped and calmed, and Finella had rushed them through the Gates and into the world. 

Even ten years later, Peggy could not comprehend the immensity of what Finella had done. There was no guarantee that Bhelen would kill the servants, and she could have lived out her life in Orzammar in relative comfort, found a new House to serve, remained near to her family. But at the bidding of her mistress she had clad herself in her warmest clothes and fled to the surface, forever exiling herself from her home.

All for a quiet and awkward dwarf girl who had no way of grasping the sacrifice she had made. 

They ran into the snow, out into the endless dark, and of that Peggy could remember nothing. It might have been days, it might have been weeks- she had no idea if she starved, or if she cried, or if she snarled and kicked and howled and begged to go home. 

How Finella did not simply leave her for dead in a snowdrift, she would never know. 

When she next remembered, there was stone above her again, and there was warmth in her toes and fingers again. And-

_-humans._

She had never met a human, only heard stories. In her nursery books that had seemed like such large and cruel creatures, far too big and oafish and far too hungry for the world to belong to them. She had thought they would seem much bigger, when she finally met one, and she thought they would have more teeth.

But it was a woman, a human woman, who sat nearby, humming quietly to herself as she sewed- and she was _beautiful_. Her features were delicate, not monstrous, her lips wide and soft and her nose flat. Her dark skin glowed under the light of the lanterns- blue lanterns, not red- and she’d glanced up as if she’d felt Peggy’s eyes upon her.

And smiled gently. 

“Welcome to Cadash Thaig, little one,” she’d said, and Peggy had fallen in love with her. 

She was the first mage Peggy had ever met, the first in her new family of refugees and apostates. 

And when the time came many years later, older and wiser and faster, her fingers scarred by years of tinkering with alchemy, she donned her travelling gear and headed for the rumoured meetplace, an ambassador for the people she loved and would die defending.

And when she staggered out of the Fade, hand ablaze, no one could have guessed that a dwarf would fight without question on behalf of the mages.


	3. Written in the cards but buried in the earth

Corinne was Corinne, and she was happy with that. She knew it was good and proper to have a following name, a way to finish off your name like a title, a flourish, and she knew it was usually a sign of your parentage. That was of no good to her then, given that her parents had gone to great pains to make sure the world was not aware of her presence. 

Her family had once lived in warmer climes, and there was much they had brought with them from the homeland. It was more than a preference for rich and spicy food, more than the lilt in the way they spoke- it was a way of life, the heart and soul and faith the Chantry had done their best to exterminate. 

Her great grandmother had been the first to take the risk, hiding a hedgewitch amongst her handmaids with the Chantry none the wiser; after all, great grandmamma still attended services with great diligence and made all the appropriate tithes. No one suspected that the young woman who whispered occasionally in her ear and attended her with downcast eyes was anything other than a dutiful servant. 

There were many words for it- hedgewitch, apostate, maleficar, sorceress, temptress, heathen bitch. Presumably it was no different in grandmamma’s day to what Corinne grew up with, and she found men to be creatures far too given over to panic when it came to the unknown. Nadifa, the woman who had served her mother dutifully for years, had performed rather simple tasks. She read the cards when called upon, or tea leaves, and warned the family when the omens were not in their favour. 

She brewed simple poultices and potions, and she kept up the wards around the family home that were said to deter not only demons but those who meant the family illwill. Divination and a boost to their luck- hardly the work of a villainess, but the Chantry was rather unwilling to bend on ancient laws, and so Nadifa was married to the groundskeeper, a useful cover should the need to explain her presence ever arise.

Lady Trevelyan had been trying for a third child for some time, desperate for a son to offset the two daughters she had already borne. Nadifa was by her side constantly, with herbs to increase fertility and improve health, helping her towards her goal of a son. 

In the fifth month of the pregnancy, with all things going according to plan, Nadifa read the cards for her mistress, hoping to find something of the boy’s future- and instead found news that devastated the Lord and Lady.

For the babe was not the long hoped for male heir, but a girl- and she was a mage, and a powerful one at that. 

The child’s fate was hotly debated for months, for a girl was bad enough, but a mage? A mage could bring the scrutiny of the Chantry and the Templars down upon them, and for a family who had been practicing heathens for multiple generations, that was unacceptable. There was talk of ending the pregnancy, or of drowning the babe at birth. 

Nadifa, horrified and disgusted that her gift might be used as evidence to kill a child, offered an alternative- she and her husband would take the girl, and raise her as their own. The family could spread the news that the child had died, and could mourn appropriately, while she could take the baby out of sight and out of mind. 

And so Corinne was born, marked and condemned for her powers before she’d even drawn her first breath, spirited away from the birth not five minutes after entering the world, squirming and sticky and tiny. Instead of being washed and cooed over and placed in the bassinet of the Trevelyan line, she spent her first day wrapped in swaddling clothes asleep in the tiny shack that Nadifa and Benan called home. 

Corinne Trevelyan was Corinne with no name. Corinne the groundskeeper’s daughter. Corinne, the strange little wild girl who ran along the edge of the property at all hours of the day and night, always filthy and always improper. She followed in Benan’s footsteps as he tended to the immense gardens, and she was only a toddler when the magic first began to flourish within her.

She could sing to the earth, and it would follow her. She would kiss the budding plants, and they would burst into bloom. The branches of the forest reached out as she passed, leaves brushing lovingly against her face. 

She was Corinne of the wild, of the earth. 

No great surprise, then, that she would be the guardian of it when the world broke.


	4. The dead will speak if you listen, but do not suffer them to sing

Mythal’s Daughter. That was the name she wanted to be remembered by. 

There were so many others, most of which cut like tiny little knives each time they were uttered. Inquisitor- _hmmph_ , in whose name did she _inquisite_ , when these shems were so quick to forget that it was a name from _their_ history, hunters from their past who had not elected to discriminate between shem apostate and elvhen when the shems had cast the world into darkness to begin with. They had stolen their magic and cursed them with the quickening, and then did not see a difference between the People and the shems who crumbled in the face of a power they had not anticipated. 

Herald? That she hated, loathed above all else. She did not speak for their dead shem witch, and would not have spoken to her even if she had found her voice in the Fade. Did they not see how gravely they hurt her each time they called her that, to look past her skin and her ears and her vallaslin and disregard all that made her who she was, presuming that an honour for them was an honour for her?

Lavellan was not so bad, though it brought memories of her brother, and Thérèse was better, because that was the name she had chosen for herself when she had made the change. It was not the best, of course, because that was the name her brother’s ghost whispered to her across the Veil, and sometimes she wept because she knew she could not answer him. 

It was odd that a child on the path of Mythal would wield the power of the dead- most had assumed she would pledge herself to Falon’din and she had uncomfortably accepted the words of the Keeper on the matter. But when the time had come to begin the vallaslin, the very night before in fact, she had dreamed. 

And she had seen the world burned to ash, a wasteland of death and destruction the likes of which she could never imagine. She had seen Elgarnan himself, mighty is he, at war with the sun, furious in his grief and violent in his rage. 

There was so much death, so many voices clamouring to be heard, that she had dropped to her knees in the black and lifeless earth, clasping her hands to her ears in a desperate attempt to block it out. Where was Falon’din, to guide them into peace? Where was the Veil, to keep the dead and the living apart?

And a hand, pale and cool, had smoothed the hair away from her face and come to rest on her shoulder. From that touch alone she knew the greatest sense of serenity she had ever felt, the vast and endless love that a mother had for her child, the grief she felt at their pain and the safe place she offered in her heart. 

Mythal had reminded her of her mother, long gone from the world, when she’d finally dared to glance back at her. Her smile had been kind, but sad, and Thérèse did not care that she was only a dream, that Mythal had been lost to them in ages past thanks to the conniving of the Dread Wolf.

She had felt her love, and she had known peace.

Mythal smiled at her, and her fingers brushed against Thérèse’s tear stained cheek. “It will come again,” she whispered.

What would come again? The blackened earth? The jealousy of the sun? The dead unfettered from the land beyond? A million questions and more bubbled up to her lips, but she could not find the strength to voice them. 

And Mythal, dearest and most lovely, had kissed her on the forehead, and she had woken with tears in her eyes. 

They changed the design of the vallaslin, to best honour Mythal, and she made sure to place the best of her offerings on Mythal’s shrine.

It would come again- and Mythal’s Daughter would be ready for it.


	5. Divinity is bought in blood

Blood was a measure of power- that was something she had learned early. Blood conveyed status, blood conveyed the significance of your heritage.

Blood held power, the most primal of mana.

Antara had the _wrong_ blood. 

It was one of the earliest things she had known about herself- the shame she had inflicted on the family, the disgrace, for daring to be born without magic talent. Her parents’ marriage was one of convenience, a power play. Two of the greatest families in Tevinter coming together to sire a new generation of mages who would make the world tremble with the force of their magical might. 

Antara, first to be born to such an arrangement, did not show magical potential as a toddler, and her parents derided her as a waste of their time. She was raised by a legion of nannies and minders, the precious heir to two immense dynasties, and even if she was slow to develop she would not be allowed to come to harm.

When she was five, her parents hired the greatest tutors in the land to coax the magic from her, and their lessons were not kind. She hated them, a violent and spoiled raptor of a child, and she fought them with everything in her. 

By the time she was eight, it was clear that she had no talent, and no amount of violent encouragement was going to make it appear. It was a huge loss of face for both families, and the cold resentment her parents held for each other flared even higher. Both blamed the other for the failure that was their daughter. 

In time, and frustration, they conceived another child, a little brother for Antara.

And she _despised_ him.

Golden child, beloved son, charming violent witty hateful heir to a magister dynasty that should have been hers. She hated him in that way that only children can hate, her violence towards him cruel and innocent and complete. 

He, in turn, hated her. But he would inherit, and she would not, and their parents would defer to him, and not to her- and they both knew it. Their squabbling as children became paranoid violence as youths and eventually all out war as adults- assassins and legions and poisons and death. He was the golden one, the dashing young man with the future set before him, everything beginning to set in order for him to one day ascend to the throne of the Archon, all things going according to plan. 

So Antara killed him. 

To kill a rival in Tevinter is expected- it is a sign of strength, an endless shifting chess board soaked in the blood of millions. But for a mage to lie slain at the hands of a non-mage, for the heir to be murdered by an upstart with no right to the claim... this could not be borne.

They took her in chains and paraded her through the streets, blooded and broken and bruised and despised. Her parents disowned her, and a mage-killer with no house to protect them is a most delicious prey in Tevinter. They whipped her with magics far crueller than any leather could hope to be, stripping the skin from her back until she could no longer stand. And still she defied them, plotting her vengeance with every streak of fire across her body. 

She escaped, resourceful even at her lowest, and fled to Orlais, mingling amongst the thousands of refugees who had fled at the news of a Blight. Disgusting, filthy people, uneducated and common, she despised them almost as much as she despised her own parents- she would not be reduced to this, she was destined for greater things and she would have those greater things. 

A liar and a charmer- she still had those skills of course. She constructed an elaborate background for herself, a new life in Orlais. She was Antara Trevelyan, heiress and niece of a doddering old matron with no children but a vast fortune at her disposal. What was The Game to her, she who had survived the ruthless machinations of the courts of the Magisters?

Her power grew, and she spun her lies. She would have power, and she would have revenge.

And when she held her hand aloft with the power to change the very fabric of the world, she knew she would have it. 

Divinity was hers, and a god would not be denied.


End file.
